The shortlist for the 2013 Costa Book Awards has been announced, and in one pivotal category all the nominees are women. The Costa Book Awards — formerly known as the Whitbread Book awards — are given out every year to books written by British or Irish authors. Winners are chosen in five categories – novel, first novel, poetry, biography and children’s book – with winners announced in January. Amongst those selected winners, a book of the year is then chosen, which comes with a £30,000 (about $48,000) prize.

In this year’s best novel category, all of the shortlisted authors are women, and one writer, Bernardine Bishop, is being nominated posthumously. Bishop, who passed away in July at the age of 73, wrote the shortlisted Unexpected Lessons in Love, as well as two other yet-to-be-published novels, shortly before her death. “It is wonderful and also very sad because Bernadine’s not here to enjoy it,” her editor, Kate Parkin, told the Guardian. “I wish she had been.”

The shortlisted nominees in each category are:

Novel award:

Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

Bernardine Bishop, Unexpected Lessons in Love

Maggie O’Farrell, Instructions for a Heatwave

Evie Wyld, All the Birds, Singing

First novel award

Sam Byers, Idiopathy

Kate Clanchy, Meeting the English

Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

Sathnam Sanghera, Marriage Material

Biography award

Gavin Francis, Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins

Thomas Harding, Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

Congrats to these writers on a superb accomplishment!Today's authors need to be savvy about marketing as well as writing, and many jump start their careers with self-publishing. ( here's a Resource Guide for new authors: http://www.janmoranwrites.com/resources/)Best wishes to all my feiw authors!